Gang rapes and beheadings: UN reveals new South Sudan abuses

JUBA, South Sudan – The witness accounts remain appalling. One South Sudanese man returned home after hiding from government soldiers to find they had blinded his mother, gouging out her eyes with spears.

She had tried to defend her 17-year-old daughter from being raped by more than a dozen soldiers and didn't succeed. Seventeen soldiers then raped her. The family's father was beheaded.

The latest report on human rights abuses in South Sudan's five-year civil war, released on Friday by a United Nations commission, includes that horrific day in Pagak town and many others as the team collects evidence in the hopes of one day finding justice.

"I did not expect to be confronted with so much ritual humiliation and degradation deliberately done for multiple reasons. The suffering and cruelty was worse than anyone could have imagined," Andrew Clapham, a commission member and international law professor, told The Associated Press.

One South Sudanese woman told the commission that her 12-year-old son was forced to have sex with his grandmother to stay alive, the report says.

The findings, with "sufficient evidence" against both President Salva Kiir's government forces and rebels, identify more than 40 senior military officials, including three state governors, "who may bear individual responsibility for war crimes."

The report will be presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva next month. They also will be made available to judicial mechanisms such as a hybrid court for South Sudan, which long has been urged by the international community but has never appeared.

Untold tens of thousands have been killed in South Sudan since the conflict erupted in December 2013, just two years after independence from Sudan. More than two million people have fled the country, the largest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide 24 years ago. Millions who remain at home face hunger.

The new U.N. report is an account of the gang-rapes, castrations, ethnic violence and other abuses that have left much of the impoverished East African nation in despair, while international frustration with the warring sides grows. An attempt at a cease-fire in late December was violated within hours. Disgusted, the United States announced a largely symbolic arms embargo and urged the U.N. Security Council to do the same.

South Sudan's government did not immediately comment Friday. "The human rights body should start putting the blame directly on the regime instead of blaming both sides," opposition spokesman Lam Paul Gabriel told the AP.

While names of alleged perpetrators are being collected by the U.N. commission, they are not shared publicly to help protect witnesses who come forward. The names are being given to the U.N. human rights office in Geneva.

The new report, based on 230 witness statements and other materials, is the second since the U.N. commission was established in 2016 and the first since it was given a stronger mandate to preserve evidence and conduct investigations instead of simply monitoring and reporting.

South Sudan's conflict is splintering into chaos, the new report says. What began as a "power struggle" between Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar has fractured into an estimated 40 armed groups across the country, with many fighting each other.

But consistent patterns stand out, such as government attacks on unarmed, fleeing civilians in areas where no opposition forces were present, the report says. "There is a clear pattern of ethnic persecution, for the most part by government forces," Clapham said.

Despite the latest accounts of abuses, South Sudan experts are skeptical that anything will change amid what the report calls a "grave" lack of accountability.

"The recommendations of these human rights reports have not been implemented in South Sudan, making them useless," Jacob Chol, senior political analyst and professor at the University of Juba, told the AP. He said human rights abusers should be barred from the South Sudan peace talks in neighboring Ethiopia.

Those talks reached a stalemate last week but are expected to pick up again next month.